CPB Group Examines Digital Archive for Public TV
A system akin to BBC online library Creative Archive is something U.S. public TV should explore, a CPB report said. Authored by a CPB-convened working group on digital rights, the report described how Creative Archive gathers content from the BBC and other major video producers and how public TV in the U.S. could create a variation on it with partners like the Library of Congress. The archive would help further a public TV goal of maximizing public access to its content, it said.
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“Swift action” is needed to keep public broadcasters relevant in a “rapidly evolving” new media space, the group, made up mostly of public TV executives, said, warning against big spending since “there are too many unknowns.” A better path is “smaller scale experimentation,” the report said: “We are a decentralized system and close to our audience, therefore well suited to experimentation.” With commercial broadcasters and others moving quickly to meet and form consumer expectations, however, public broadcasters must act immediately, the report said: “Our mantra is ’small experiments now.'”
New media projects by PBS, NPR and others have aided public broadcasting at large, the report said. An NPR podcast pilot, begun in Sept. 2005 in collaboration with stations, logged 5 million downloads in less than 2 months, and NPR is expanding the program, it said. A download-to-own project begun by PBS with producing stations WGBH and WNET via Google and Amazon doesn’t aim only to make money but also to create partnerships in Internet ventures and to generate new ideas, it said. One of many revenue strategies for stations PBS is exploring is to provide Internet access to certain “premium” content as a perk of station membership.
Fewer than a dozen public TV stations produce broadcast content for PBS distribution, the group said, but the lower cost of making and distributing Internet content will bring more stations into that effort, it said. Rather than having programs with potentially broader audiences make room for new programs, stations can stream them, it added. And stations can use the Internet to pool resources and expand their reach, it said, citing American Field Guide. Hosted by PBS, the site aggregates science and nature video content from more than 50 stations. But the working group warned against enforcing coalitions that either limit stations’ autonomy or benefit one station at another’s expense without a “net positive to the overall system.”
Public broadcasters’ efforts to raise money by putting publicly-funded content online, as in PBS’s download-to-own project, evoke mixed reactions, the report said. “Euphoria” has greeted the unprecedented access to content, but there’s “anger” at PBS charging for publicly-funded programming, it added. As for the online rights of educational institutions using public TV content, the group recommended that today’s analog rights be extended to the digital environment.
Digital rights is a “huge issue” for public TV, Assn. of Public TV Pres. John Lawson said. As an example, he described how a copyright law exemption for use of public TV content in classrooms has grown obsolete and needs updating. Producing stations, guilds, unions and other rights holders are starting a conversation on how to keep content broadly accessible, he said: “Over the next year we will be examining some modifications to the copyright law to accomplish that goal if necessary.” ATPS expects that its 2007 requests to Congress for funding for digital content will “involve resources to clear rights so that publicly funded can be very widely distributed across every platform,” he added.